www.quora.com/Has-someone-ever-left-you-midway-in-a-relationship-without-even-explaining/answer/Joreth-InnkeeperQ. Has someone ever left you midway in a relationship without even explaining?A. How do you leave a relationship “midway”? Isn’t leaving pretty much the definition of the end, not the middle?
But if you mean, has someone ever surprised me by ending a relationship with me when I thought the relationship was going well or at least not at the point of ending it, and didn’t explain to me why they were leaving, yes. Several times. It’s called “ghosting”.
When two people go through a painful breakup that both are aware is a breakup, and one of them chooses to cut off contact with the other after the breakup, that’s not ghosting. Ghosting is when one person chooses to end a relationship when the other person has no indication that the relationship was problematic enough to make the other person want to leave, and the person doing the ghosting cuts off all contact and leaves no explanation. I have 4 examples I’ll talk about, but they’re not the only examples in my life.
The clearest example I have of someone doing that to me was when I had just started dating someone. We had been dating for only a few weeks, but he had already started saying that he loved me. He called me one night to say that there was a death in his family and he needed to go out of town (only a few hours away) to handle things. He would be back in a few days. His last words to me were “I love you baby, and I can’t wait to see you again.”
This was back in the MySpace days, where blocking people wasn’t an option and their profile showed anyone who visited when they last logged in. So I could tell that he was regularly logging into his MySpace, so he wasn’t lying dead in a ditch somewhere halfway between my town and his family’s town where the funeral was.
Eventually, I camped out in front of his house and waited for several hours for him to come home from work. When he did, I confronted him. He gave me all kinds of bullshit excuses and promised we could work things out. I left that night knowing that I would never hear from him again, and I didn’t. I still don’t know why he did it.
I wasn’t asking him to get back together, I asked him why he would say what he said and then disappear. He tried to give excuses for why he hadn’t contacted me, but they were obvious as he was saying them that they were excuses. So I let him say them and I let him give me more false promises to call me and “work things out”, and I just left.
Another time, I met a guy who was quite a few years younger than I was, but he developed a crush on me. I figured, why not? We opted for an FWB relationship, but he kept having these intimate, vulnerable talks with me after our booty calls, so I developed feelings for him. He seemed to have feelings for me too.
Then he stopped responding to my calls. Just dropped off the face of the earth. Nobody seemed to know where he went, at least, that’s what people said to me.
Nearly 10 years later, he messaged me out of the blue. Still a little hurt, but hey, 10 years is 10 years, I answered. He wanted to talk on the phone, so we did. He said something about being young and immature and having family issues that overwhelmed him so he moved out of state to escape everyone. But since then, some shit had gone down that made him grow up fast. Now he was back in the area and he wanted to be friends again.
He started calling me while working his night job, and I would often fall asleep on the phone from talking for hours at a time. Eventually, he came to see me and talked about trying a real relationship with me, not just the FWB we had before. I expressed my doubts that he could do it, but he insisted he could. He also wanted to explore some kink with me, knowing that I was experienced and he had none.
We had one make-out session, which I ended by saying we really needed to discuss what kind of relationship we were going to have and what he wanted from a kink relationship with me. He said he was really excited about exploring something, but he didn’t even know where to start. So I suggested we go to a local kink club and a regional conference where he could be exposed to a variety of options and other people who might have some ideas or suggestions.
He sounded excited about that. We made plans to go, which he canceled on. And then he never responded to another text or phone call or online message again. So he ghosted me twice.
About 3 or 4 years later, he re-friended me on Facebook. I accepted the friend request but I didn’t message him. A few months after that, he sent me a message apologizing for disappearing, saying family shit overwhelmed him and he had to escape so he moved to another state. I said something like “huh, imagine that?” He asked what that meant and I said that was the same thing he said last time he ghosted me. He said something about his life being kinda dramatic. That’s the last thing we said, over a year ago.
The most recent example was someone else who did it to me twice. Many, many years ago, we met and had this amazing chemistry that he seemed to fight. But then one day he came over and said he was done fighting, we should be together. Then, literally in the middle of having sex, he got up, said he couldn’t do this, and left, half-dressed. He didn’t return any of my phone calls and the one friend of his who I knew would only say that he “moved to Texas” (he didn’t, as I found out later).
A few years later, we ran into each other again. It was awkward and uncomfortable and I got out of the encounter as quickly as I could. A couple years later we ran into each other again. It was slightly less awkward, but he apologized and said he was immature and frightened and didn’t know how to handle it. He wanted to be friends again.
Dubious, I gave him my number. We didn’t really keep in touch much. I invited him to a handful of social events, he would never go, I stopped inviting him.
Then, a few years after that, one day I just decided to invite him to something because I was inviting *everyone* in my address book. That thing he attended. So I invited him to another thing. He attended. Suddenly, we were talking to each other. After some very intense conversations, I decided that 10 years was enough for him to have grown up, to feel real remorse, and to be ready to try again.
So we did. This time, things were going well. We got along great with each other. We were open and intimate with each other. We both happened to suffer from a depressive episode at about the same time (unrelated to our relationship) and we were instrumental in each other’s recovery.
3.5 years into our second try, he started getting “busy”. When he used to spend 2 long weekends a month with me and constantly text me throughout the days apart, we very slowly started seeing each other less and less. I brought it up, he promised he was “working on it”, nothing would change, I’d bring it up again, he promised things were “getting better”, nothing would change, rinse, repeat.
Almost exactly a year after I noticed and started commenting on the problem, we had a Talk about it. I told him it was not acceptable to me anymore that he go 3 or 4 months without us seeing each other, given that we only lived a few miles apart. Since spending several days at a time seemed to be so taxing for him I offered him the option of one date night a month where it was focused time together. He turned that down and opted instead for our regular “weekends” together.
We never had another weekend together. Almost overnight, he stopped responding to texts, phone calls, and online messages. Finally, one day, I had been having things shipped to his house because things got stolen off my porch in my neighborhood and his neighborhood was safer. Something I had ordered weeks prior arrived at his house, and he texted me to let me know it had arrived. He offered to bring it by.
Having read the writing on the wall this time, I had all of his things that he left at my house packed up and ready. I didn’t plan to break up with him, but I was going to be prepared if he decided to break up with me. I was still hoping for some kind of answer and a change in his behaviour. Depending on how he handled the conversation I was going to make him have when he dropped off my package, I would either hand him his things or I would quietly unpack them after he left and not even let him know I had packed them..
He chose to come over when he knew I had only a few minutes left to get ready for work. I asked him “so, are we still dating or what?” As soon as he started with “well … you didn’t do anything wrong, it’s just that I’m not fulfilling you, and …” I interrupted him and said “yeah, I figured that’s what you’d say,” and went into the other room to get his things and dropped them at his feet.
I told him that ghosting me was the absolute worst way he could have chosen to break up with me, given that he had done it to me once before and I only got back with him on the condition that he would not break up with me in that way again. He protested, saying that he never ghosted me. I pointed out that he stopped responding to all forms of communication for weeks and he only deigned to speak to me when a package arrived. That’s ghosting.
He said that he just didn’t know what to say or how to do it. I pointed out to him that I’m writing a book on how to ethically breakup with someone and I already have an online document titled my User Manual which gives instructions for exactly how to break up with *me*. Of literally anyone in the world, I’m one of the last people anyone should be confused about how to break up with me. I come with instructions.
I have no doubt that if he hadn’t needed to get my packages to me, I would never have heard from him again unless I chased after him.
So then, while I’m still nursing my hurt feelings over this breakup, a friend who I’ve had a thing for asks me out. I tell him that I’m not in a position for a big-r Relationship because I’m on the rebound and he’s never been in a poly relationship before, but perhaps we could talk about a fling. He says it’s an emotional connection or nothing - no casual sex for him.
So we talk and talk and talk, and eventually decide that we might try some kind of relationship and see where it goes. We have a couple of good dates, and our last one is really hot and heavy. We have so much chemistry between us! We continued texting on the way home and through the night when we got home. I have texts from him that night telling me how hard he’s falling for me and how safe and loved he feels with me.
Literally the next day, he texts me to say his ex wants to talk, do I mind if he goes out with her? I’m poly, so although I’m concerned about an ex, I say he can. He texts me that night to say he wants to have sex with her, do I mind? Again, I’m concerned, but as I’m also working on another FWB of my own, I say OK and thank him for telling me.
The next day, radio silence. He doesn’t respond to any of my messages. The day after, I message him to ask why the radio silence. I can see that he checked the message. After a long pause, he messages back to say that he’s getting back together with the ex and she “won’t have it”, meaning she won’t let him date me too. He has since blocked me from contacting him.
So, yeah, I’ve had lots of people ghost me, or break up with me at points in the relationship that I felt were “midway” or when things were going well, or at least when I felt that things were not at the end. I find it to be one of the most cruel ways to end a relationship with a person and I am permanently scarred from all the times it has happened to me.
This latest one happening on the heels of the one prior to it has triggered my depression again, so now I have to have people check in on me to make sure I’m OK. And all for someone I didn’t even want to get involved with in the first place because I didn’t think either one of us was ready for a relationship.
When people give you that aphorism “when someone tells you who they are, believe them”, believe them. There were plenty of signs, but I keep giving people the benefit of the doubt, and I pay for it every single time.
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